Introduction

Abstract

This volume contains the first English translation of Emile Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method that does justice in terms of accuracy and elegance to the original text. It also brings together his more interesting subsequent statements (most of them hitherto untranslated) on the nature and scope of sociology and its method.¹ They take various forms, including contributions to debates and letters, and show him confronting critics and seeking to clarify his positions. They cover the period between his first major book, The Division of Labour in Society (1893) and his last, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912). During this period, he not only published and lectured on suicide, the family, crime and punishment, legal and political sociology, the history of socialism, the history of education in France since earliest times, the sociology of morality, primitive classification and the sociology of religion, but he also established the remarkable journal, the Année sociologique (of which twelve fat volumes appeared between 1898 and 1913) and, through it, the Durkheimian school of French sociology. This flourished briefly, until the carnage of the First World War, barely surviving its founder in an increasingly alien intellectual climate between the wars; yet it has had a profound impact on the history of the human sciences in France and outside, from the French Annales school through British social anthropology to American sociology.